Best Practices for Writing Protocols in Markdown

Writing/Editing by: Tiffany Lowe-Power

• Use a new line for every sentence. This helps with version control – individually changed sentences will be highlighted upon commits (easy to parse) rather than whole paragraphs (nightmare to parse).
  • This formatting is incompatible with a double space after period. Do a find and replace for “. “ –> “. “. Be careful not to blanket remove all double spaces because tabbed bullets have 3 spaces.

• “.md” are markdown files.

• Lab convention is to use underscores (_) between words and all lowercase.

• Add protocol entries as links to the README.md

• Add linked content (e.g. images, excel workbooks, etc) to sub-directories

• If you use the Visual Studio Code to fork, edit, and commit protocols, you can view the source code side-by-side with the markdown Preview:

• When making numbered lists, just use 1. for all numbers. Markdown will make them sequential automatically. This is helpful if you go back & add additional entries later.

• Use “XXX” to indicate an area that needs editing. This will allow the lab to CTRL+F for “XXX” and find areas that need editing.